Lucy Gunning at Greene Naftali - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This novel York debut of the 32-year-old British artist Lucy Gunning consisted of sum of two units video works, Climbing Around My play (1993) and The Singing exercise (1995). Like quite a scarcely any artists these days, Gunning makes works that easily accommodate with themselves to capsule descriptions somewhat in the manner of television program listings. Her 1994 work The Horse Impressionists (not in this show) consisted of five women imitating horses for the camera. Climbing Around My scope is an 8-minute color video which records a woman making sum of two units circuits of a room without one time touching the floor. By contrast, The Singing task is slightly harder to summarize. In this hour-long work, sum of two units video monitors face each other. upon one we see a music teacher in the proces of instructing a learner On the other, the tape exhibits the student, played by Gunning, attempting to go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the teacher's instruction with not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of success.

Far remov from the attention-getting ploy of Damien Hirst, Gunning's artful transformations of the everyday can be linked to other younger British artists of the like kind as Gillian Wearing, who has asked strangers to write their notions on sign boards and photographed them holding the signs, and Steven Pippin, who has make go rounded washing machines into cameras and bathroom fixtures into darkrooms. These artists share a refreshing economy of means that joins the unpretending materials of Conceptual art and the Punkera ideal of self-expression being lay open to all. Roberta Smith picked up this democratic strain in her of recent origin York Times review of Gunning's present to view when she compared Climbing Around My extent to someone trying to do a Matthew Barney piece "at residence without all the props." Gunning's work also brings to mind a certain number of of Rebecca Horn's early videos.

Climbing Around My expanse follows the protagonist, wearing a r dres on the other hand barefoot, as she adroitly uses each available purchase (door knob, clothes hasp wainscoting, window ledge, bookshelves, etc) to cutting side her way around the perimeter of an ordinary range In addition to the ingenuity of this domestic version of stone climbing, what strikes one is the entire concentration the woman brings to her not divisible by 2 task. While seeming to illustrate the phrase "I was climbing the walls," the work can be read as an allegory of many sorts of human endeavor. It also presents the spectacle of an adult playing a childlike game which, paradoxically, is sole possible for an adult--a child's material substance would be too small to reach the widely-spaced hand-and footholds

If compell to elect between Matthew Barney's extravagant productions and Gunning's low-tech exercises, I would be inclined to favor the latter, not least because Gunning proffers in place of Barney's hyper--athleticism, a more inclusive--yet no les striving.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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